Eels andWhiti Te Ra in fi­nal

Te Aroha will play Whiti Te Ra in this week’s Welling­ton club rugby league grand fi­nal af­ter beat­ing Rand­wick in the rain on Satur­day.

Al­though far from per­fect in the big wet, the 28-10 win to the Eels now means they will bid to cap­ture back-to-back Welling­ton ti­tles.

Te Aroha col­lected the first two tries be­fore the King­fish­ers flew back to be trail­ing 10-6 af­ter the open­ing 10 min­utes of the game.

The Eels soon picked them­selves back up again to revel in the slip­pery con­di­tions as the blue and golds gave away too many turnovers early in the tackle count to hand Te Aroha a wealth of the pos­ses­sion.

Af­ter be­ing tested in the first quar­ter, Te Aroha grew in con­fi­dence for the re­main­der of the half and through some fine slid­ing de­fence which shut out some counter at­tacks, the Eels led 22-6 at half­time.

The sec­ond spell re­sulted in both sides scor­ing a try each, be­fore Rand­wick sim­ply ran out of time, op­tions and pa­tience.

Te Aroha coach Rangi Luke was philo­soph­i­cal.

‘‘Al­though the score sug­gests that we won eas­ily, I al­ways knew it was never go­ing to be an easy game and so now we need to re­group one more time this week and start to pre­pare for against a side that has been on a roll from the very first round of the sea­son.’’